Former coach pleads guilty to sex charge in Ark.

Former coach pleads guilty to sex charge in Ark.

A former youth baseball coach in southwest Arkansas pleaded guilty this week to transporting a minor across state lines for sex.

TEXARKANA, Ark. (AP) - A former youth baseball coach in southwest Arkansas pleaded guilty this week to transporting a minor across state lines for sex.

Walter Richard Roberts of Texarkana, Ark., entered the plea Thursday as part of an agreement with federal prosecutors. He faces up to 10 years in prison, prosecutors said. Online court records did not list a sentencing date as of Friday.

Prosecutors said Roberts, 62, was a youth baseball coach in Texarkana from 1986 to 1994 and that he engaged in a pattern of sexual assault that spanned several years.

In 1986, prosecutors said he took a 9-year-old boy and a 10-year-old boy to a supply store on the Texas side of Texarkana and sexually assaulted them in the back of a van. Roberts also admitted to sexually assaulting a third boy who was 9 or 10 years old in 1988 or 1989, prosecutors said.

"The pattern of sexual abuse that this defendant committed is reprehensible," Conner Eldridge, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas, said in a statement.